It's too bad about Webserver02, which took a critical hit in the thunderstorms the other day. An old 486 Celeron with less than a gig of RAM, it was quite an anemic machine but still served it's limited purpose well.

Chief among the server's tasks was to handle SMTP traffic from the Internet router, ie, it was my mail server. In addition to that important task, it was set to periodically replicate all production databases from the primary database server. This automated process served not only my basic data backup needs but also provided a failover option in the event the primary server, Webserver03, goes down.

Webserver03 is a workhorse and almost never goes down but when it does all I need do is flip a switch on the router and send all HTTP requests to Webserver02 and it's like nothing ever happened. After the primary server is repaired, the databases will replicate and I flip the router switch back and voila. Though there are even better ways to automatically handle failover, it is still a sophisticated setup for a rinky-dink operation run out of the corner of a garage.

The downside is that I need to replace the functionality of the backup server so I have some work to do. I refurbished a machine several weeks ago and built it into Webserver04 but I have not been using it yet. I was going to replace the production server with it but instead of making Webserver03 the new backup server (do you see the pattern?) I was going to get rid of it and continue using Webserver02 as the backup. Not only would that be less work, but Webserver03 is the old Dell PowerEdge 6300 with dual Xeon processors, RAID, and three power supplies. Meaning it sucks down a lot of power. And it is very noisy. And it is quite large and heavy. A pain in the ass in general.

Webserver02 is probably fixable if I can figure out what's wrong with it. It turns on, completes the self-test, detects the hard drives, loads the boot loader and then turns itself off. It wont turn on again until the power cable is removed and replaced. The operating system (Win NT 4.0 Service Pack 863) never starts to load. It's probably the mainboard, unfortunately. A death sentence for such a relic.

I have to recover the mail files from Webserver02 but I should have email back up at some point this weekend.

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